DUSHANBE, November 25, 2014, Asia-Plus – A three-day workshop on pre-screening legal acts to identify provisions that may be vague or contradictory and therefore encourage corruption started at the OSCE Office in Tajikistan yesterday.
According to the OSCE Office, the workshop is the last phase of a one-month activity with the objective to produce a methodology on anti-corruption law screening.
An expert from Transparency International’s Russia Chapter, with OSCE support, is working directly with the Agency for State Financial Control and Combating Corruption (Anti-Corruption Agency) to develop a methodology as a part of this activity.
The methodology will help practitioners from the Anti-Corruption Agency, Prosecutor General’s Office, Interior Ministry, Justice Ministry, Public Service Agency, Lower House of the Parliament and other bodies to better understand the concept of anti-corruption law screening and to reduce the risk of corruption prone interpretation of legal provisions.
The need for this was first laid down in a presidential decree in 2010 “On Additional Measures for Combating Corruption.”
“The OSCE Office in Tajikistan has been supporting the Government in this field as early as 2011 when the Office started to provide expert advice on the draft Law on Anti-Corruption Law-screening that was ratified by the President in December 2012,” said Martin Rossmann, Head of the Economic and Environmental Department at the OSCE Office in Tajikistan. “Over the past year, the Office has organized various awareness-raising and capacity-building initiatives to familiarize state structures with this concept.”
In January 2014, the Office decided jointly with the Anti-Corruption Agency to develop a methodology for a training module for pre-screening and make it available to a broader audience. The objective of training module and workshop is to support the creation of a cross-institutional pool of experts on anti-corruption law screening.
